Nvidia's Geforce GTX 1080 Performance and Features Detailed - As Powerful As A GTX 980 SLI in Gaming, Up To 3x Better Performance in VR

Nvidia has unveiled its brand new GTX 1080 graphics card at a new price point of $599 MSRP. We already knew the specifications and timeline of the launch weeks before but Nvidia still managed to impress us in terms of performance numbers. While the benchmarks come direct from Nvidia (tertiary political party reviews aren't out yet) they do serve to highlight the amazing potential of Pascal architecture and the FinFET process.

Nvidia launches the Pascal based GTX 1080 - doubles the performance of the GTX 980

Nvidia has achieved something truly remarkable with the GTX 1080. According to the official numbers, the carte is roughly equivalent to a GTX 980 in SLI. That is a performance increase of 100%! In specific VR utilise-cases, the performance per watt increment tin really be as high every bit 200%. So at any given fourth dimension yous are looking at a performance of 2x to 3x depending on the awarding in question. The Geforce GTX 1080 is the beginning graphics carte to utilize the make new GDDR5X standard from Micron.

Rocking the GP104-400-A1 GPU flavor the card is expected to feature 2560 CUDA Cores and if the nautical chart revealed by nvidia is to-calibration then we are looking at around a twenty% increase over the GTX 980 Ti (at the clock speeds shown in the demo). Nvidia's Pascal architecture is manufactured on the 16nm FinFET process (which inherently brings a 2x Perf/Watt increase). GP100 focused on increasing gimped FP64 performance (that Maxwell suffered from) and so the GP104 focuses primarily on unmarried precision performance (good news for games).

Official Gaming Performance Benchmarks of the GTX 1080

Nvidia posted some early figures of their next-generation graphics carte du jour on the Geforce website and they tested three different applications: a VR demo, a DX12 and an overall intensive AAA title. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is a beautiful game but it is well known as a card killer. The GTX 1080 manages to go nigh twice the amount of operation every bit its predecessor clocking somewhere around ane.6x. Keep in mind that while we do non know the verbal resolution these were run at, intensive games similar the Witcher are GPU-bound, which makes the criterion legitimate (low resolutions plus light load equals a CPU bound scenario in which GPU functioning cannot be measured accurately).

The DirectX 12 title hither is the latest Tomb Raider. The GTX 1080 over here manages to reach 1.7x the performance of its predecessor, which is pretty impressive. The last generation of Nvidia GPUs had some trouble under DX12 with some specific games, and information technology remains to be seen whether Pascal architecture managed to correct that flaw. Finally, we have the VR "Barbarian" demo in which the GTX 1080 is able to reach non 2x but almost 3x the performance of its older counterpart! That is incredibly impressive and is the result of Nvidia employing new technologies that aid lighten the VR workload (detailed below).

Improved Power Engine

Ability supplied to the GPU is absolutely essential in any architecture. Many AIB models which provide a higher overclocking headroom actually improve the capabilities of the card by providing a more stable ability supply. The GTX 1080 builds upon this ideology and aims to increase not only the ability efficiency of the GPU nether heavy workloads but besides provide a more than consequent and stable power supply at the same time. The GTX 1080 is actually 80%+ power efficient under a total workload, while as the 980 did non quite reach that mark.

The new card is also able to limit the ripples in the power supply to only 120mV which is almost twice every bit power efficient as the card it succeeds - which has ripples of 209 mV superlative to superlative. This new ability efficiency not only allows Nvidia to provide an incredibly powerful GPU with just 180W TDP and a unmarried 8-pin connector, but also provide more than overclocking headroom. This is something that was readily credible in today's demo, which brings the states to the overclocking aspect of the 1080:

Incredible Overclocking Potential of the GTX 1080

The official clocks of the GTX 1080 are listed as 1733 Mhz, but the demo that was shown on the Nvidia special event was actually running at a cool ii.i Ghz. And that also on an air libation! This ways that the demo was actually running most 23% higher than the official heave clock (which is already 40% college than Maxwell by the style). Needless to say we are looking at some pretty impressive overclocking headroom over here. The shift to FinFETs is partly to be thanked for the loftier clock rate achievable and the fact that the scrap tin remain so absurd while doing so. It goes without saying that the graphics menu used in the demo probably had a paw-picked GPU then whether that exact amount of OC can be recreated on air with off the shelf GTX 1080s remains to exist seen.

Support for HB SLI Bridge Technology

Nvidia also sneakily launched a make new iteration of SLI bridges, dubbed the "HB SLI Bridge", which I assume stands for High Bandwidth SLI Bridge. The official Geforce site has the post-obit to say about the new tech:

NVIDIA'due south new SLI HB bridge doubles the available transfer bandwidth compared to the NVIDIA Maxwell^™ architecture. Delivering silky-polish gameplay, it'south the all-time way to experience environment gaming—and it's only uniform with the GeForce GTX 1080.

So these new HB SLI bridges volition be able to offer twice as much transfer bandwidth equally opposed to the older variants. AMD shifted long ago to a bridge-gratuitous approach and information technology would have been dainty to run into Nvidia following suite. SLI Bridges usually exercise not require a high amount of bandwidth since they are only used for syncing and timing so the truthful impact of this change remains to be seen.

Simultaneous Multi Project Technology

Much of the functioning increment you aw in the VR benchmark above is attributable to this new tech in Pascal based GPUs. The GTX 1080 introduces "Simultaneous Multi Projection" which allows the GPU to create different viewpoints of the aforementioned scene with significantly decreased operation hit. Virtual Reality is the adjacent frontier that GPUs must conquer and outputting two unlike viewpoints simultaneously without incurring a huge functioning penalization is 1 of the major challenges. With this new tech, Nvidia seems to have made significant progress towards the same:

The kickoff frame shows the VR demo running without the "unmarried pass stereo" filter. The GPU is outputting frame rates consistently around the 60 fps mark. This is withal low enough to cause move sickness in VR setups. Once the Single Pass Stereo filter is turned on however, the frames instantly jump to the adequete xc fps marking and remain in that location consistently. Nvidia achieved this using some serious technical wizardry and is something which will allow it to become increased performance in VR titles.

Official Geforce GTX 1080 and Geforce GTX 1070 Specifications

WCCFTech	Nvidia Geforce GTX 1080	Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070
Architecture	Pascal	Pascal
Transistors	vii.ii Billion	7.2 Billion
CUDA Cores	2560	1920
Cadre Clock	1607 Mhz	TBA
Boost Clock	1733 Mhz	1683 Mhz
Memory Type	G5X (GDDR5X)	GDDR5
Memory Speed	10 Gbps	8 Gbps
Retentivity Configuration	8GB	8GB
Passenger vehicle Width	256-bit	256-bit
Retentiveness Bandwidth	320 GB/s	256 GB/s
Multi Projection	Yep	Yes
HB SLI Bridge Support	Yep	Yes
Nvidia GPU Boost	3.0	3.0
DirectX 12 Feature Level	12_1	12_1
OpenGL	4.5	4.5
Vulkan API	Yes	Yes
Maximum Digital Resolution	7680x4320@60Hz	7680x4320@60Hz
Brandish Connectors	DP ane.42, HDMI 2.0b, DL-DVI	DP 1.42, HDMI ii.0b, DL-DVI
HDCP	2.2	2.2
Power Describe	180W	150W
Power Connector	Single viii-Pin	Single viii-Pin
Maximum Operating Temp	94 C	94 C
Partner Price (MSRP)	$599	$379
Iron Price (MSRP)	$699	$449